Netgear’s WNDR3700 Paradise vs Linksys’s WRT610N Hell

NetGear’s WNDR3700 what an excellent router it is! got mine a few days ago and I couldn’t be happier with it because of its great speed, long range, and the ease with which I was able to just hook up my FreeAngent USB drive, thus making my media and files available to me in my entire home network and worldwide via FTP and HTTP, overall it was so easy to setup, I love the ability to create a guest network for home visitors etc, this is an awesome machine, loving it, not one single crash or disconnection in any device throughout the house, oh and finally my Zune finds my home network! The person who gave this router a 1 at bestbuy.com must have some serious cabling or interference issues or simply doesn’t know how to set up a router.
The only downside I noticed is that the setup wizard CD that comes with it is not compatible with Windows 7, given the fact that Win 7 is around the corner NetGear should have taken care of that, however the router can easily be setup manually by going to http://192.168.1.1/index.htm with your browser.

A month ago I had a big storm in my area and all my equipment got bricked, modem, NIC card, external dialup modem (which I only use with Phonetray) and yes my router, I had been a Linksys loyal user for years, but when this happened and my WRT54GX2 gave up the ghost, I had no choice but to start looking for a new router, first I tried the Linksys WRT400N but it turns out that this one did not have Gigabit ports and on top of that the router was crashing whenever I attempted to stream videos to my PS3 with it, so I went for their top of line product the WRT610N which cost me a nice $199 USD, but I was totally disappointed with it, this product could have been one of their best ever, its concept and set of features is magnificent, it did look really feature complete to me, so I went ahead shelled out that amount of money and bought it home, days after using I realized it must be one of the worst products Linksys has ever put out on the market and the certainly one of the worst I have got myself.

I did not pay attention to the reviews, but boy that was a mistake! I had horrible connectivity issues in all my devices, PS3 kept getting disconnected and whenever I tried to access files or videos the Router would crash and reset my internet connection in all my devices on the network, the storage feature (one of the main reasons I bought it for) is a mess, it wouldn’t recognize my created users, I couldn’t change passwords, and while attempting to connect from the internet with an ftp client it always complained that the user/pass was wrong, but IT WAS NOT! the software that comes with the router DOES NOT work and crashes, sometimes it won’t even start! and for the record YES I DID upgrade the firmware to their latest version, Linksys should fire or demote whoever watched over product quality when developing this product, I can’t believe they are charging $200 for it, it’s not worthy $20, get it out of the stores, recall it, it’s giving you a bad name Linksys! I wish I could get v2 but there’s no tell until you open the box, and who knows if it will be same?

I’m now a happy camper with my storm’s nightmare behind me, I only paid $159 for a product far superior and that actually does what it promises, keep up the good work NetGear.

I agree 100% with everything you said! I’ll add that my WRT610N would occasionally just reboot and revert to factory defaults, leaving my network completely open with the default “LinkSys” SSID! Talk about security risk! Luckily I was within my return period and I returned the WRT610N and got the WNDR3700. Better signal strength, solid as a rock, and it doesn’t spontaneously reboot and leave your network open to attack!

Hey Paul, thanks for your post, thanks for pointing that out, I really didn’t notice that when I had the WRT610, hopefully the second version was better for those who got it.

Mike hello and thank you for stopping by, wow that’s indeed messed up, I didn’t notice this on my WRT610 but I can imagine your frustration after realizing this, so far I’m going for 5 months with the WNDR3700 and I haven’t experience any issues at all, except for some sporadic lockups which appear to have been fixed once and for all in the latest firmware update.

Great Info, I have 2 questions for you, i hope you get some time to get back to me, i am interested in purchsing this device after all the good reviews that i have read specially vs the linksys WRT610,

Can this decive allow multiple users on the network access the External Hard Drive connected to the router via the USB Ready Share for simultaneous use?
and also can i connect my USB Printer to this decive instead of purchasing a Print Server?

Hi Houtan, I know the answer to your first question is Yes, you can share an external hard drive connected to the router via the USB Ready Share for simultaneous use among different devices on the network, regarding the printer I haven’t tried myself so I cannot tell from my own experience however based on some reviews I have read on the net I believe this is not possible, but again I haven’t tried it myself sorry.

The WNDR3700 is a well engineered product. It has features that I wasn’t shopping for but now use. Nice product, exceeded my expectations. I hear a lot of griping about the Linksys WRT610N so I’m glad I didn’t buy one. I was leaning in that direction because the NetGear WGR614 that I had went “stinko” after I upgradeed to Windows 7. I never did learn what caused it to transmit so slow, I got no help from NetGear to resolve the issue and was upset enough to buy Linksys but from what I read, I’m glad I didn’t. I guess… Read more »

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March 11, 2010 8:08 am

Guest

Ruben

I got another thing to add, Excuse my english in advance, i own a WRT610N Version 2.0 and its COMPLETELY SHIT!, thing reboots everytime there is no good firmware at all.. all settings keeps reseting to factory… im only getting 20 mb of my 80 mb connection so that mean im onlly getting 25% speed of my 80 mb internet.. wireless is shit on 2.4 and on 5ghz, lag on Xbox. random dc’s on my ps3, its not worth buying it it costed me around 140,00€, anyways im thinking about buying a WNDR3700. I heared it was worth buying it.… Read more »

I had some problems with the WRT610N version 2 … but its easily fixed. for me it was when I left channel to auto. I realized my previous router WRT54G v3 with tomato firmware had no auto setting for channel, you had to pick one for yourself.

So in the WRT610N, I made sure to choose only 20MHz, and instead of auto chose channel 9. (9 is as good as any, my range preference is 6 – 9)

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